Why we are Different.

It's the little things that count as well as the big things.
We make ourselves available and take a real interest in you and your
business. This means going the extra mile, here are examples of this:
Getting a call on a Saturday evening, and not waiting until the working
week to respond but responding immediately and being available to
assist with the issue at hand. This should not be unusual, but
unfortunately it is.
Helping where we can on unrelated issues. In one instance, I coached
and helped prepare a Best Man's speech. He
was incredibly nervous at the prospect, not unusually for a business
person, very good at speaking on topics with which he was very
familiar, but very nervous about talking in front of family and
friends, where intimacy and humour might be expected. He nailed it!
We'll join you on parts of the journey. In some instances instead of
making the suggestion of adopting a new
habit, we'll propose buddying up. Two instances come to mind, one was
to drop all cursing or offensive language. So to this day, don't be
surprised to hear more civilised alternatives such as
"discombobulated", "crepuscular", "coprolite" etc when we talk. The
other involved a
get-fit programme, which entailed committing to 15 mins of exercise for
every 30 mins of television viewed. We agreed that the exercise should
be
done whilst viewing. We both still chuckle at the price we paid during
the Cricket World Cup semi-final against New Zealand. This was not a
match you could walk away from! Result? The afternoon was
fine apart from him being teased at work, (he
watched at his business premises!), but we both struggled the next day.
I remember not being able to speak on my cell phone for long, because I
got cramp in my bent elbow! After that we agreed that stretching should
be included in our definition of exercise!
Going the extra mile is demonstrated in other ways, here are 3 recent
examples. One instance involved the interviewing of a person for a key
role. (All roles are important but more on that another time.) The two
of them had arranged dinner at a restaurant on a week day evening. This
is a technique that I picked up from one of my own mentors, Nico
Jacobs, a few years ago. I was more than happy to observe and when
invited to do so, participate. There is no extra fee and no reluctance,
just the simple commitment to do what the situation demands.
In another instance, as I was leaving a manufacturing premises on the
West Rand mention was made of the 3rd month in a row of cable
theft disrupting business. Curious, I probed a bit. It turns out that
these cables, are thicker than an average man's upper arm, are buried,
and when stolen impact whole business areas. On my way home I thought
of how we could get this solved. Let me bore you with the issue,
there's a product called BII, Business Interruption Insurance, which
covers a wide range of operational costs as well as profits that would
have been earned. But, there's always a but, this is not a stand-alone
product and is attached to the main property or comprehensive cover. It
also demands some sort of business continuity infrastructure be in
place, which can be very expensive for a single business. I could see
this turning into a major project. Thinking a little more I realised
that this would be a great opportunity for a single insurance broker to
consolidate the various businesses and negotiate a solution with a
single insurer, who would then put measures in place to prevent the
theft. End result? The broker earns 12% commission on a lot of new
business, the businesses have an insurer who will have an incentive and
the means to prevent the theft. A genuine win-win-win outcome!
There are more examples, but you get the picture.
Being different is demonstrated in other ways. So far we've explained
the manner in which our interest in both you and your business leads to
greater participation. Now let's consider the content of the wide range
of tools we apply. In every instance where we introduce something you
can be assured that we have used this somewhere in the last 20 years
ourselves, and invariably what you might receive in the contents of a
book, we share with you in a refined version with actual real life
worked examples, supported by reference material that we have put
together ourselves. We don't sell you a book, we provide you with
material that we have written ourselves.
Where others have put together something better, like Verne Harnish's
single pager strategy plan, we acknowledge and use this (it is in the
public domain and we have spoken to Gazelle's, Jean Carpenter, to
verify that we can do so). But in addition to these tools, you will
find original tools that we use, and make freely available, that
others for reasons we cannot fathom do not make available to you, such
as our approach to Value Based Management using Value Trees
and Contribution Curves.
You may argue that all of this would be provided by any decent
consulting house. True, perhaps, but not without costing you the
equivalent of a farm in Sandton, with no effort to transfer knowledge
and to embed their use in your business, and with no thinking or input
into the complementary habits and behaviours required to make sure that
the tools themselves and the outputs of these tools, are successful
embraced by the rest of the business!
It is our years of experience as both consultants, locally and
internationally, and as business people owning the income statement
that allows us to interact with you that no amount of training and
certification can bring you.
Lastly, out of all the coaches and consultants out there, try and find
one who
actually is involved and personally invested in the development of an
existing and successful business themselves, apart from their coaching.
We devote all our time to the development of our own business,
for more on Entacore please follow this link: What makes you think you
have something to add?